ASRock’s Bitcoin mining motherboards support 6 graphics cards

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Looking for a new motherboard? Why not pick up one that could potentially pay for itself, like the new Bitcoin mining mainboards from ASRock?

The H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC both feature a whopping six PCI express slots. They’re not all the kind that are made for gaming, either. There’s just one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot in the bunch, and the others are all PCIe 2.0 x1 slots.

You’re not going to use them to set up an epic twelve-monitor desktop, but x1 slots are fine for handing off computing chores to the additional GPUs you can pop in. The question really isn’t whether or not all these slots are useful — it’s whether or not ASRock’s Bitcoin motherboards actually make any sense at all.

Bitcoin mining at home can be an expensive proposition, especially in places where electricity rates are steep. When you’re mining using a half-dozen powerful video cards to crunch the numbers, you’ll be sucking down plenty of juice. Depending on how much power your new cards are drawing, you could actually end up losing money.

The real kicker, of course, is the up-front cost to populate all those slots on these new boards. Six AMD Radeon 7970 cards are going to run you around $2,000. Although that’d yield somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,300Mhas/s, it could take ages to even come close to paying off the bill for those cards and your insane new motherboard.

Compare that cost to a more energy-efficient ASIC setup from a company like Avalon. A $3,300 standalone ASIC miner can get you around 140 Ghash/s, and that’s a massive upgrade.

Is there any point in buying an ASRock Bitcoin motherboard for the sole purpose of mining? No, not really. You’d be better off with a dedicated gaming system and an ASIC-based mining rig. Kudos to ASRock for trying, though. They’ve never been afraid to release odd mainboard configurations in the past, and it’s nice to see that they’re still willing to take risks — even if it doesn’t always make sense.